WALL, a gallery and the publisher of "Hinism," an art magazine that supports emerging contemporary art-ists ( www.g-wall.org ) , is showing a series of photos by newcomer Masahiro Sanbe.
More than any other art form, photography cuts out a sliver of time and freezes a moment. Sanbe manages to capture a wide spectrum of such "sliced moments" in his debut - a rushed lunch at a busy noodle stand, a stroll with pets at dusk, cooling down in a cafe. The exhibition brings together 25 monochrome photos taken over a four-year period in London, Amsterdam, Okinawa and Tokyo. Besides the occasional kanji signage exposing location, each photograph is geographically ambiguous,meaning it is featuring the inhabitants,rather than the city.
The images in the exhibition are neither confrontational nor contrived, as the artist documents ordinary people going about their daily lives. Sanbe focuses on the slight gestures and the natural ease of his subjects, which creates the illusion of movement in each photograph. His inspiration comes from "glass and mirrors," and he often experiments with the reflections and refractions of light. "With color photography," he says, "people can get drawn in by certain colors, but with black-and-white photography I can let the lighting and simple lines show. This gives my work a rawness I want to achieve."
Sanbe plans to continue to develop the Tokyo series of this exhibition.
(Katherine Pham Do)

THE JAPAN TIMES・THURSDAY,MARCH 16,2006

English / Japanese